Modern Democracies, Vol. 2 by James Bryce

Author:James Bryce [Bryce, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politikwissenschaft
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
Published: 2017-09-20T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER LVIII: THE DECLINE OF LEGISLATURES

Every traveller who, curious in political affairs, enquires in the countries which he visits how their legislative bodies are working, receives from the elder men the same discouraging answer. They tell him, in terms much the same everywhere, that there is less brilliant speaking than in the days of their own youth, that the tone of manners has declined, that the best citizens are less disposed to enter the Chamber, that its proceedings are less fully reported and excite less interest, that a seat in it confers less social status, and that, for one reason or another, the respect felt for it has waned. The wary traveller discounts these jeremiads, conscious of the tendency in himself, growing with his years, to dwell in memory chiefly upon the things he used to most enjoy in his boyhood,— the long fine summers when one could swim daily in the river and apples were plentiful, the fine hard winters when the ice sheets on Windermere or Loch Lomond gathered crowds of skaters. Nevertheless this disparagement of the legislatures of our own day is too general, and appears in too many forms, to be passed by. There is evidence to indicate in nearly every country some decline from that admiration of and confidence in the system of representative government which in England possessed the generation who took their constitutional history from Hallam and Macaulay, and their political philosophy from John Stuart Mill and Walter Bagehot; and in the United States that earlier generation which between 1820 and 1850 looked on the Federal System and the legislatures working under it in the nation and the States as the almost perfect model of what constitutional government ought to be. In the middle of last century most Liberal thinkers in France and Spain, in Italy and Germany expected a sort of millennium from the establishment in their midst of representative institutions like those of England, the greatest improvement, it was often said, that had ever been introduced into government, and one which, had the ancient world discovered it, might have saved the Greek republics from the Macedonian conqueror and Rome from the despotism of the Caesars. So the leaders of the revolutions which liberated Spanish America took as their pattern the American Federal System which had made it possible for a central Congress and legislative bodies in every State to give effect to the will of a free people scattered over a vast continent, holding them together in one great body while also enabling each division of the population to enact laws appropriate to their respective needs. By the representative system the executive would, they believed, be duly guided and controlled, by it the best wisdom of the country would be gathered into deliberative bodies whose debates would enlighten the people, and in which men fit for leadership could show their powers. Whoever now looks back to read the speeches and writings of statesmen and students between 1830 and 1870, comparing them

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